Marquis W. Childs and Sweden: The making and unmaking of a modern political myth

For almost a hundred years the political left has attempted to use Sweden as a model for other countries. This book follows the history of how this has been done, from its inception in the 1930s to the current plethora of global surveys and rankings claiming to measure such things as modernity and corruption. Throughout, we can see how the left has misused, first a certain form of ethnography, later modernist political science and sociology, and, today, global surveys and rankings. Most importantly, representatives of Swedish officialdom and American fellow travellers have colluded in obfuscating and lying about the the relation between freedom and welfare in Sweden. The main point about the Swedish model is not so much the failures of its economic and social policies in the 1970s and 1980s, nor the current problems that it has with regards to the economy and immigration. Instead, it is a lack of modernity and liberal democracy. Because of this it cannot serve as a model for other countries. Based on an informed and fine-grained anthropological analysis, recent and more critical research and the voices of internal Swedish critics, a completely different image of Sweden emerges. Why this debunking has been so long in coming is also explained in terms of deeper fallacies in Western self-understanding through positivist social science. Taken together, this suggests that the use of Sweden as a model by the political left may be one of the worst and most long-lived political hoaxes of Western modernity, social science and political thought perpetrated on the world.

• | Author: Mattias Bourne
• | Publisher: Independently Published
• | Publication Date: November 07, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 318 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1706404360
• | ISBN-13: 9781706404361